clone a drive, no raid involved

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, Brad Mettee wrote:

> I'm setting up a pair of machines with almost identical OS config, and 
> completely identical hardware. One is a primary DNS server, the other is 
> secondary. NS1 will also serve web, NS2 will be a mail server. Both are low 
> volume/loads.
>
> It looks like I can use DD to copy an entire drive, but it's a 500G drive and 
> that's going to take a really long time (especially since it's brand new with 
> no data besides base OS).
>
> My question: Is there a better way to duplicate a drive including boot info?

The way I've done that in the past is to backup the source system with 
dump for /, /var, and /usr.

Then do a minimal install on the clone, setting up the appropriate 
partition sizes.  That is quicker for me than trying to remember fdisk 
and bsdlabel options.  It also avoids the embarrassing situation of 
getting source and destination disks mixed up when they're both on the 
same machine.

On the clone, restore from the original dump files over the new system 
with "restore -ruf dumpfile".

This may be helpful:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA